How are Queenslanders coping with swamped homes and deadly snakes? Bonnie
Malkin reports.

Trisha Hollingworth knew that it was time to evacuate her home on the outskirts of Rockhampton when she awoke to floodwaters lapping at the front steps. She had been told that the water was coming, but the speed with which it arrived took her by surprise. The front garden, where she had celebrated New Year's Eve with a barbecue with her neighbours, was one foot under water by the morning of January 1. Two days later, the rust-coloured water had reached the fifth step of her home, just inches shy of her front door. It was time to go.

By then, the only way out was in the "tinnie" – a small aluminium boat usually reserved for fishing on the nearby Fitzroy River. But ever since the river burst its banks, the boat has replaced the family car. "You have to boat in and boat out now. If you tried to walk, the water would be up to your chest and it is running so fast it would just drag you away," Mrs Hollingworth says. "The road has become part of the river, it is like living in the middle of the ocean."

Rockhampton, a town of 77,000 people 370 miles north of Brisbane, lies close to the coast, on the Fitzroy, one of Australia's largest river systems. It is among the biggest of the 22 towns affected by the tide of flooding that has swept across the eastern Australian state of Queensland over the past three days, and also one of the worst hit.

All main routes to the south, north and west of the city have been cut by the rising water. Rail lines and the airport runways are also submerged and the floodwaters stretch for several miles in each direction. On the Bruce Highway to the south, one of the few things to rise above the water is the "Welcome to Rockhampton" sign.

"Rockhampton is an island," the town's mayor, Brad Carter, says. "You can look down a street for a kilometre and see nothing but water." As well as the human residents, the local wildlife has been caught off-guard by nature's excesses. Bewildered and hungry kangaroos can be seen gathered together on any scrap of high ground and at night the sound of bellowing cattle, lost and confused by the water, fills the air.

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And the water is still rising. Floodwaters stand at about 30ft and over the next 48 hours the Fitzroy River is expected to swell another 15in, to levels not seen since 1954. At that height, an estimated 1,400 homes in Rockhampton will be inundated. In an attempt to prevent any more deaths or serious injuries in the floodwater, forced evacuations are under way across the town, with residents directed to emergency shelters where they can expect to spend at least a week waiting for the waters to subside.

Mrs Hollingworth and her husband, Frank, decided to evacuate to a caravan in the centre of the town. Their neighbour Lee Carol chose to join them after she realised that her low-lying home would be engulfed by the rising waters overnight. "I've put the chooks [chickens] and the turkeys on the roof and the birds on the kitchen table, but I'll lose everything else," she says. Speaking last night from the bar of the Great Western Hotel, where many Rockhampton residents had gathered to swap stories about the flood, she said she was desperately worried about her property, "but there is nothing I can do to save it." Miss Carol said she wanted to stay at the house for as long as possible, but was put off by the arrival of scores of deadly brown snakes. "I shot 17 in one day, and a woman down the road shot 26," she says. "They come out of the water looking for dry ground all day, but they can kill you just as quick as the floods can."

The Hollingworths and Miss Carol, who live in the Rockhampton suburb of Port Curtis, are just a few of the 200,000 people displaced by the Queensland floods that have submerged an area the same size as France and Germany combined, turned towns, mines and farms into a muddy inland sea and killed three people so far. Two of those who died had been trying to flee the floodwaters in their cars when they were swept away. The floods – triggered by torrential rain which fell on the Sunshine State before Christmas – have been blamed on the La Niña weather pattern, during which the tropical seas of the Pacific Ocean cool, prompting heavy rains and storms over the east coast of Australia.

The floods came just months after the end of a 10-year drought and two years after bush fires that killed more than 170 people in the southern state of Victoria. But farmers who had been used to praying for rain are not celebrating, for these floods are devastating.

The storms, cyclones and flooding are the latest examples of extreme weather to hit Australia, the driest inhabited continent on Earth, which is considered to be highly vulnerable to climate change. While Australians are the largest per capita carbon emitters on the globe, political debate over how to deal with global warming stalled last year after the then prime minister, Kevin Rudd, failed to push his carbon trading scheme through parliament. His successor, Julia Gillard, has since pledged to put a price on carbon, but faces strong opposition from Tony Abbott, the leader of the conservative Liberal-National coalition, who once said that climate change was "absolute crap". However, the soaring cost of the floods – already estimated at $1 billion – could restart the discussion.

The rising waters have washed away vital rail tracks linking mines to the ports, halting operations at 75 per cent of Queensland's coal fields and forcing some miners to suspend production and cancel shipments. Australia is the world's largest exporter of coal, most of which comes from mines in Queensland. With no coal to load, the crisis has left a backlog of empty freighters along the nation's busiest shipping lanes, delaying deliveries to Europe and Asia.

The state's wheat and sugar industries have also been affected, as has the tourist industry, which sustains many parts of coastal Queensland during the usually sunny summer months. Anna Bligh, the Queensland state premier, has warned that she expects the state to face serious long-term effects from the natural disaster. And Miss Gillard said recovery would take "a significant amount of time".

But while people in some parts of the state start the process of returning home and surveying the damage, the authorities have warned that this crisis "of biblical proportions" is far from over. Floodwaters from the north of Queensland are yet to make their way into several low-lying towns, and forecasters are predicting yet more rain, more catastrophic flooding and more loss of life.

Warren Bridson, acting assistant director-general of Emergency Management Queensland, said that the authorities were "very conscious" of the likelihood that more wet weather was on the cards. "The Bureau of Meteorology predicted this to be a very severe wet season," he says. "We still have three months ahead of us, so we must expect lots more of what we're currently having."

The weather bureau has predicted five or six cyclones this season. "We've had one," Mr Bridson says. "Theoretically we have four to go." Queensland couldn't ask for a worse prediction.